


A Storybook Country

by Griddlebone



Category: Kino no Tabi | Kino's Journey - Keiichi Sigsawa, Princess Tutu
Genre: Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Dreams, Fairy Tale Elements, Gen, Nonbinary Character, POV Outsider, Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-16
Updated: 2020-12-16
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:53:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28113441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Griddlebone/pseuds/Griddlebone
Summary: Kino and Hermes travel to a country unlike any they have visited before. What mysteries does Gold Crown Town hold for two travelers passing through?
Comments: 8
Kudos: 12
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	A Storybook Country

**Author's Note:**

  * For [UnderSnowVixen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/UnderSnowVixen/gifts).



> Thank you for the great prompts, I hope you enjoy!

Once upon a time, two travelers followed a road through the forest until they came to a town surrounded by a wall with five gates. Even from a distance one could see this was a happy and prosperous place; the wall was tall and well-maintained, and towers spaced evenly around it gave it the look of a crown—it was only on their way in that the travelers found out that there were four more gates by which they could have entered and by which they might leave.

Hidden within the wall was a charming town with cobbled streets. People milled about here and there, in clusters, or wandered along the streets on some errand or another. Most of them were smiling.

“It’s like something out of one of those storybooks you like to find,” Hermes said.

Kino chuckled. “It kind of is. Do you like it, Hermes?”

“How should I know? We just got here.“

Still amused by Hermes’s first impression—or lack thereof—of this country, Kino set about looking for someone who might be able to recommend a good place for a traveler to stay. There were a fair number of people about and they looked friendly enough; this wasn’t a country where the residents were suspicious of travelers. It shouldn’t be difficult to find out what Kino needed to know.

The girl wasn’t watching where she was going and ran right into Kino before she even realized there was a person in her way. She jumped back with an endearingly alarmed look on her face, apologies spilling from her lips in a breathless and seemingly unending stream. She was a bright-eyed girl, with orange hair in a braid all the way down her back, and wearing a dress that looked like it might be a uniform. Kino knew that young people in some countries wore uniforms when they went to school. This might be one of those, they thought.

Regardless, Kino liked her immediately, despite the fact that she had literally just run into them. “It’s all right,” they soothed. “But maybe you can help me out. Do you know if there’s a place around here for travelers to stay? Preferably somewhere cheap…”

“Well, there’s the inn down the street,” the girl said after a moment’s thought. She gestured to Kino’s right. “There’s a big sign, you can’t miss it!”

Out of nowhere, Hermes asked, “Is that person an animal?”

Kino and the local girl both looked down the street in the direction she had pointed only a moment ago. Sure enough, there was a figure that was as tall as a man yet undeniably also, apparently, a housecat crossing a few blocks down.

“Oh, that’s Mr. Cat, the ballet teacher! He’s always been like that… I think!”

“You think?” Kino asked.

The girl pantomimed thinking hard. “Yeah! I’m pretty sure he’s always been a cat, I mean, why wouldn’t he be? Lots of people around here are animals. What’s so weird about that?” Her words said one thing, but her voice and uneasy laughter said another thing entirely: she wasn't as sure as she wanted to be. “Aaaaanyway… I really have to get going, you see, I’m trying to find my prince… Did I say prince? I meant my classmate from the ballet school. It’s really important that I find him before we’re both late to class…” She kept talking even as she had already started off down the street, heading in the opposite direction from Mr. Cat.

“Good luck,” Kino called after her.

“Thank you!” she shouted back with a cheerful wave.

“That was certainly strange,” Hermes said.

“We’ve never been to a country where animals could be people before,” Kino agreed. The two of them had traveled to lots of places that seemed strange to outsiders, but never one quite like this. It might be strange and new, but that strangeness and newness brought a smile to Kino’s face. New experiences like this were what made traveling so interesting.

There was a museum in town, they discovered completely by accident on their second day in town. It was tucked away off a side street, with only a tiny worn sign to give any indication of its presence. It might almost not have been there at all. But Kino saw the sign when they glanced down that side street, and they were curious.

Hermes waited at the side of the road, being less interested in the relics of human culture than Kino was—and even less interested in being inside a building (especially one not built to accommodate motorrads) than Kino was—while Kino approached.

Standing to one side of the door was a woman playing a barrel organ. Her posture and expression were stiff, almost lifeless, yet mounted above her instrument was a tray that seemed to come alive with the sparkle of gems. Somehow Kino had not noticed her standing there before. They must have been too focused on the idea of the museum.

“Would you like to buy a gem?” she asked as Kino drew near. A closer look revealed a tray filled with carefully arranged jewels of every shape, size, and color. Despite the care this woman had taken to display her jewels, it looked only like so much colorful chaos to Kino. They had no idea how to choose one even if they did want to buy one. And besides, they probably didn't have enough money to spare, anyway. Still, a look wouldn't cost anything.

“Really?” Hermes asked. “More baubles? Remember what happened last time?”

“Would you like one, Hermes?”

If the woman thought it strange to see a human person talking to a machine person in this country without motorrads, she did not say so. The tight, wooden smile remained on her face, unchanged.

“Here is ‘generosity’, and, here, ‘compassion’. And this one,” she said, pointing, “is called ‘wanderlust’.”

Kino leaned close to peer at ‘wanderlust’, and for a moment it seemed as if they could see a winding, tree-lined road in the mottled green-and-brown of the polished stone. It was gone in an instant, a trick of the eye, but they were a little impressed that such a vision could be captured in the facets of a cut stone.

Still, there was something just the tiniest bit uncomfortable about those gems—like none of them were _meant_ for the likes of Kino. Like they were somehow supposed to stay here, in this town, rather than going off with travelers who might never come this way again. Kino could not have explained why this was all so suddenly apparent, and was glad that Hermes did not ask.

They thanked the jewel-seller and turned to go into the museum, if it was open. There was no way to tell from the outside; there was just a big wooden door and the tiny sign.

“You wish to go into the museum?” the jewel-seller asked.

“May I?” Kino asked in return, suddenly wondering if they might find the door locked and the museum closed.

“Those who seek knowledge may gain entry,” she assured Kino, “though what the museum contains is not meant for the people who live in Gold Crown Town.”

“Does that mean the people who live here can’t go inside?” Hermes asked.

“Indeed,” the jewel-seller said, with the same indifferent serenity with which she had spoken all this time. She made it sound as if this were a perfectly natural state of affairs.

“That’s weird,” Hermes quipped. To Kino: “Are you sure you still want to go inside?”

“May as well see what the fuss is about,” Kino said, pushing the door open. It opened easily, after all, on hinges that had been recently oiled.

“But there isn’t any fuss!” Hermes called from outside.

Hermes wasn’t wrong, but Kino was nevertheless curious about this place and the secrets it might hide. What kind of museum was hidden from the locals, anyway? And why even have a museum at all if the people who lived here couldn’t go inside?

Kino stepped through the door and into the museum. It was not a large space, but it did not feel claustrophobic the way small spaces so often did. Rather, it felt like a cozy corner where one might settle for a while to page through a favorite book. Electric lights in sconces along the wall filled the space with a warm and gentle light, illuminating the manuscripts and loose pages that filled the numerous display cases.

 _Once upon a time,_ Kino thought they heard someone whisper, _there was a man who died._

“A man who… died?” Kino murmured, echoing, but there was no response. Perhaps it had only been their imagination after all.

Shaking off the sudden, strange sensation that they were being watched, Kino approached the first of the display cases. Inside were descriptions pulled from various sources that together formed a sort of biographical sketch for a man who must once have been a very prominent figure in the town. A man who had written various unlikely but well-loved tales, but who had died in the midst of writing his last story, a story whose ending would remain forever unwritten.

“Drosselmeyer.” Kino tested the syllables of the name, and the air inside the museum seemed almost to vibrate in anticipation. Again they had the sensation of being eagerly watched, as if the writer himself were supervising their visit to the museum that guarded his memory.

The remaining display cases were filled with writing. There were full stories and manuscripts, written in a crabbed, scrawling hand. There were drafts, begun but never finished, or revised into some new form. There were drawings, too, of many of the figures from the various tales.

And there was the final story, as well: a massive tome with an intricate spine label that read _Prinz und Rabe_. This book was not actually _in_ a display case, but rather on top of one, allowing visitors to flip through the pages at will. A strange decision, Kino thought, for an unfinished story. It must be only a copy.

The book was closed, yet somehow invited exploration. Perhaps it was the elaborate design on the cover. Or perhaps it was just Kino’s innate curiosity.

Their fingers brushed the cover.

They thought they heard laughter, coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once.

Kino kept going, flipping through pages that told the story of a prince locked in mortal combat with a vicious and monstrous raven. A prince who must make a terrible sacrifice in order to defeat his enemy, and of his only help in this fight: the loyal but doomed knight and the princess fated to vanish into a speck of light. There was a drawing of her, of ‘Princess Tutu,’ but when Kino turned to the next page, they found only blank paper.

It was a little disappointing, they thought, for the story to end here, with the prince’s heart shattered to pieces and his faithful knight lying dead, and the princess set to vanish once her task was completed and her secret love confessed. How, they wondered, had Drosselmeyer intended to finish this tale? Was the ending meant to be happy or tragic? Would the prince triumph, or would the raven? With the author dead, they would never know the answer.

Kino closed the book and set it back where they had found it. Again, they thought they heard the sound of laughter, but could not determine where it was coming from.

They could have spent days in the museum, easily, puzzling out the intricacies of the written language used in this country and all the secrets hidden amidst the storybook pages enshrined here… but if they did that, they knew there would not be nearly enough time to explore the rest of the town. A single afternoon would have to do.

As they stepped back through the door and onto the street, a flash of light caught their eye. They followed that light to its source and found that it must have been only a trick of the light, a flash of light reflected by some shiny piece of costuming, because the only person there was a young woman in a white tutu, flitting across the street on some errand.

She was only there for a second, and then she was gone, vanished between two buildings. It might be nothing. But then again…

“That’s… strange,” Kino said.

“What’s strange? That girl yesterday mentioned a ballet school, so seeing a dancer isn’t totally unexpected,” Hermes pointed out. At least Hermes had seen the dancer, too.

“Maybe, but there was a character just like that in one of the books in the museum.”

“Are you sure? She just looked like a dancer to me.”

Kino turned to go back into the museum, to verify what they had glimpsed earlier—a single drawing and a passing mention so brief as to nearly invite its own forgetting—among the pages of _Prinz und Rabe_ , but the door was locked. With the jewel-seller from earlier long gone, there was nobody to ask, either. They could go rushing over to where they had seen the dancer, they knew, but they had a feeling what they would find there: an empty side street, all evidence of the young woman gone.

With no way of satisfying their curiosity, Kino headed back toward the inn. They chose not to ride, walking Hermes along streets plastered with newly-hung posters for the upcoming traveling ballet performance of _Sleeping Beauty_ , and along the way they told Hermes about the strange writings they’d found in the museum.

That night Kino returned to the museum. No one guarded the door in the nighttime streets, and the door swung open in invitation as they approached.

Curious, they crossed the threshold. That was when the shadows went _wrong_.

A man stepped out, looking like a carved wooden caricature of a man, and Kino knew without knowing how that this was the writer, Drosselmeyer. This was the man who had died. And he was the source of the laughter they had heard before.

“Welcome back, traveler,” the man said, his voice an eerie singsong. There was a strange echo to that voice.

“This is your museum, then?” Kino asked, resisting the urge to reach for their persuader. The man’s sudden appearance and wild expression had set them on edge. He didn’t seem dangerous, necessarily, but Kino had learned to be cautious.

“It is, it is!” the man told them, oblivious to their unease. “There are so seldom visitors… you see, with the story unfinished, the people of the town cannot enter this place. Don’t want them getting any ideas about how things ought to end, you see.”

Kino thought this was a rather odd thing to worry about, and said so.

“Well, yes,” the man said, as if it were obvious. “But the story is part of the town now. Once the prince escaped from the story, other things started trickling out, too.”

“Things like Princess Tutu?”

The man laughed. “So you saw her, did you? Yes! Princesses and knights, and crows! One can’t be too careful, with the prince’s heart in pieces and evil crows on the loose. How wonderful it is that even I, the author, no longer know how the story will end!”

“So why let travelers in, if the local people aren’t allowed?” Kino asked. “Couldn’t a traveler also mess up your story?”

“Every good story needs a wanderer, someone with an outside perspective to provide wisdom and to carry the story's tale onward with them, to be shared with others,” the man told them. “This copy was put here for you to take, yet you left it behind earlier.”

There was no light fixture there, but a light shone onto the book like a spotlight onto a stage. Of its own accord, the front cover opened and the pages began to turn. The man beckoned Kino over. Compelled by curiosity as much as by the man’s gesture, Kino stepped closer. Again they knew, without knowing how they knew, that if they accepted the book now it would be in their room at the inn when they woke up—wait a minute, what?

“My story will be the best story ever written,” the man called Drosselmeyer said, his face twisting into a caricature of glee as he spoke. “And I need _you_ to take it out into the world. Once the whole world knows of my genius, my stories and my power will know no bounds! I will transcend death itself!”

“No thanks,” Kino said, having no desire to spread the writings of a dead man with pretensions tending toward world domination, and flipped the book closed. “There’s not enough room in my packs for a book this big.”

Drosselmeyer’s outraged howl faded into silence and the room shifted back to normal. It was as if nothing had happened. Not quite fleeing, but definitely wanting to put some distance between them and this bizarre place, Kino headed for the door. As their hand touched the handle—

Kino opened their eyes with a jolt and realized they were still in their room at the inn. Only a dream, yet it had seemed so very real...

The third day arrived with the same gentle cheer Kino had come to expect from this country. Strange dreams aside, this was a pleasant place, and one they would remember fondly once they had moved on. Morning was uneventful, filled with gunplay practice and a delicious breakfast from a bakery near the inn, and the two travelers spent the afternoon wandering through town without a destination in mind, just to see what they might see.

And they saw a lot of things: charming old-fashioned architecture, happy people going about their daily work, students on their way to class at the ballet school and elsewhere, and so many different kinds of birds--canaries and doves and pigeons and crows, as if to remind Kino that it was very nearly time to go. Birds always did make them think of traveling…

“It’s just about time, isn’t it,” Hermes observed. It sounded like a question, but wasn’t.

Kino had just finished loading their gear back into Hermes’s various packs when a rush of movement across the street caught their eye.

Sure enough, a familiar figure was dashing down the street in their direction, a single-minded determination written clearly across her face.

“Where do you think she’s going this time?” Hermes asked. “Still chasing after some prince?”

“Probably,” Kino said. “She seems like the type to keep going no matter what.”

“Really? She seemed kind of flaky to me.”

Kino could see why Hermes felt that way, but somehow they thought there was more to that girl than she let on. She’d seemed to have such a sense of purpose… even if that purpose was just tracking down one of her classmates and had nothing to do with storybook tales come to life.

She might have a strong sense of purpose, but the girl was not entirely oblivious. When she caught sight of Kino and Hermes, she slowed and then stopped. “Oh, it’s you! You’re leaving already?”

“It’s time to be on our way,” Kino told her.

“You’re not going to stay for the fire festival?”

They’d heard several people mention the upcoming festival and, honestly, they were a little sad that the timing wouldn’t work out. A local festival might have been interesting to see, and the promise of cheap and tasty food was always a tempting lure, but it would have meant setting side their three-day rule. And they were not willing to do that, no matter how nice this country was. So they shook their head. “Can’t stay.”

“That’s too bad…” She sounded like she meant it, too.

“By the way, did you ever find your prince?” Kino asked.

The girl flushed, looking absolutely flustered. “No! I mean yes… maybe? He’s not _my_ prince, he’s _a_ prince. And he’s really just one of my classmates who’s a lot _like_ a prince…”

It felt a little strange, looking at her now. She had an air about her that reminded Kino of the young woman they had glimpsed yesterday, the one in the white tutu. They were certain, now, that the girl in the tutu was at least dressed to represent the character from the story, Princess Tutu. And they wondered: if they asked about Princess Tutu, how would this girl react? This girl, who had the same guileless face and orange-colored hair.

But they chose not to ask. If she had a secret like that, who was Kino to reveal it? And besides, it wouldn't be as fun if the girl turned out not to have any connection to the stories from the museum or the ramblings of the author from Kino's dream.

So Kino asked which of the gates was the best means for leaving town. Surely each gate would lead out onto a different road, and thence a different destination.

The girl hesitated before looking a little sheepish. “I don’t really know what’s outside town,” she admitted. “Since I’m really just a d—” Kino had the sudden impression that the girl was trying very hard not to clamp her hands over her mouth as she began to make a strange coughing, quacking sound… or just run away out of sheer embarrassment. “Since I’ve lived here my whole life and never gone past the walls,” she said after she regained control of herself. “I mean, everything’s so nice here, why would I leave?” Finally, pouting a little, she concluded, “Most people who come here stay, even if they didn't plan to originally.”

“Well, I guess Hermes and I will just have to pick a gate ourselves,” Kino told her. It was sweet that she seemed to want them to stay despite knowing almost nothing about them, but that wasn’t enough to make them stay.

In the end they picked the gate that was more or less opposite to the one they had come in by. No one else was leaving town. That in itself might not be odd, but what concerned Kino was the way the gate seemed to open on empty nothingness, as if there were nothing at all beyond it.

 _Are you sure you don’t want to stay?_ It seemed that someone had asked a question, but Kino’s answer was firm: _I want to keep going. I want to travel._

It was not until they drew up to the gate that the way opened, like the drawing aside of a curtain, and the path beyond the gate came into view. They roared through the gate, propelled by Hermes’s steady motor, and into the familiar forest. Trees loomed over the path in a welcoming arch, little dapples of sunlight slipped past as they continued onward—they were on their way.

That night Kino lay beside the remains of the night’s fire, content to be on the road again even if it meant sleeping in the open, peering up at stars and clouds through the leaf cover overhead. Their tent was waiting, but they weren’t quite ready to sleep just yet.

“That was a strange country,” Hermes observed.

“It was,” Kino agreed. Strange, perhaps, but with its own sort of charm and its people like characters out of one of Drosselmeyer’s stories. For a while Kino was silent, thinking about the strange little museum and the stories hidden there, and about girls in white tutus who might or might not be part of an unfinished fairytale that had spilled into reality.

At last, into the starlight, Kino mused, “I wonder how that story will end.”


End file.
